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Orders received by U.S. manufacturers increased 1.8% in December compared with November, which saw a 0.3% decrease, the Commerce Department says. In 2012, factory orders climbed 3%, to $5.66 trillion; orders jumped 11.8% in 2011.

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Orders for clothing are coming back to U.S. manufacturers, but after 20 years of seeing jobs move overseas, factories are having a hard time attracting workers to do the cutting and sewing. Overall private-sector pay rose 1.4% in the U.S. from 2007 to 2012, while wages for cut-and-sew jobs increased 13.2%.

E-mails and other documents made public in the U.S. Justice Department's lawsuit against Standard & Poor's offer insight into happenings at the company as crisis emerged regarding mortgage-backed securities. Some S&P executives pushed to relax criteria for ratings to preserve profit, while others expressed concern about lowering standards.

Investors' losses on the 30-year U.S. government bond have topped 5% this year as buyers of Treasury securities brace for accelerating inflation. For the first time in more than a year, the Federal Reserve's benchmark for inflation expectation is near 3%.

Corporate-pension executives and other institutional investors are welcoming an increase in corporate-bond and U.S. Treasury yields, which is coming sooner than expected. If yields keep rising, the trend will open the door to more corporate defined-benefit plans, reducing long-term obligations through lump-sum distributions or the purchase of group-annuity contracts to transfer pension risk, experts say.

The Federal Reserve has made a commitment to hold short-term interest rates at or near zero "for a considerable time," but officials are raising doubts about whether that will be possible as long-term rates rise. One Fed official said the U.S. central bank won't be able to hold the line on rates.